Social media could be used to track HIV

“Real-time social media like Twitter could be used to track HIV and drug related behavior to detect potential outbreaks – and ultimately, as a tool for prevention efforts, a new UCLA-led study suggests.

“”The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Preventive Medicine, suggests that it may be possible to predict HIV and drug-use behaviors through peoples’ tweets, map where those messages come from and link them to data on the disease to be used for prevention and detection.

“Ultimately, these methods suggest that we can use ‘big data’ from social media for remote monitoring and surveillance of HIV risk behaviors and potential outbreaks,” said Sean Young, assistant professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and co-director for the Center for Digital Behavior at UCLA.

“Other studies have examined how Twitter can be used to predict certain disease outbreaks such as influenza, said Young, who is also a member of UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine, the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services and the UCLA AIDS Institute. “But this is the first to suggest that Twitter can be used to predict people’s health related behaviors and as a method for monitoring HIV-risk behaviors and drug use,” he said.

“The researchers collected more than 550 million tweets between May 26 and Dec. 9, 2012 and created an algorithm to find words and phrases in them suggesting drug use or potentially risky behaviors, such as “sex” or “get high.” They then put those tweets onto a map to see where they originated, running statistical models to see if these were areas where HIV cases had been reported.

“Overall, most of the geolocated tweets, both general as well as HIV-related, came from California (9.4 percent), Texas (9 percent), New York (5.7 percent) and Florida (5.4 percent). On a per capita basis, the largest raw number of HIV-risk related tweets came from the District of Columbia, Delaware, Louisiana and South Carolina, while the highest per capita rate of HIV-related tweets per overall rates of tweets originated in Utah, North Dakota and Nevada.

” When the researchers linked the tweets to data on HIV cases, they found a significant relationship between those indicating risky behavior and counties where the highest numbers of HIV cases were reported.

” Based on this study, the researchers conclude that it is possible to collect “big data” on real time social media such as Twitter about sexual and drug use behaviors, create a map of where these tweets are occurring, and use this information to understand and possibly predict where HIV cases and drug use occur.

” The study’s main weakness is that the HIV data comes from 2009, so in order to test if this approach can be used to predict future behaviors and outbreaks there is a need for a “gold standard” of data that is updated frequently. In this way, tweets can be accessed instantly to compare with disease outbreaks.

” This study, however, demonstrates the feasibility of using real-time social networking to identify and map HIV risk-related communications, and link them to national HIV data, the researchers write.

“This study was designed to call for future research to understand the potential cost-effectiveness of this approach and to refine methods of using real-time social networking data for HIV and public health prevention and detection,” they conclude.